Marry not for love

One effulgent weekend next month, to the rapturous cheer of the (mostly) round and (hopefully) happy faces of tens of kith and kin; a friend, Thaddeus, will be walking his young bride down one of the thousands of Cathedral aisles across the country, in observance of the Christian sacrament of holy matrimony.

Fortuitously for him, the lady in question happens to be she, whom he chooses to term ‘‘my childhood sweetheart’’.

It is in this jovial spirit that Thaddeus and I got together a couple of days past, to pop a bottle and raise capacious wooden mugs in toast to cupid (or his distant African cousin) and true love’s coming-of-age, plus the attendant demographic benefits the nation’s labor force is bound to reap from his espousal.

Through no fault of his own really, Thaddeus happens to, like me, have been born into a family F belonging to ethnicity X – one of the several tribal groupings to which many of us Ugandans proudly swear undying allegiance, to the inherent and immediate exclusion of non-belonging ‘others’.

Thaddeus of course, like many of us, is unapologetically proud of who he is – and won’t hesitate to spell out his identity to the next inquisitor, in this case what he believes to be his ethnicity, religion, gender, profession, inter-alia.

Luckily, some of these badges are obviously and noticeably artificial – to wit, religious affiliation which is mainly a matter of family tradition and/or childhood indoctrination; gender which is a matter of formal and informal socialization, profession which is a matter of schooling and educational instruction (or lack thereof), etc.

Incidentally though, there still are numerous labels we don and flaunt boisterously, under the false impression that they are our naturalized identities, unlike their cognates we readily unravel as conspicuously cosmetic.

Certainly, the problem with identity isn’t that it fails to serve our objects, insular and self-seeking though they be.

On the contrary, identity, of all anthropological categories, is best instrumentalized in, and enlisted for the inclusion and exclusion of people – the delineation of who belongs and who doesn’t.

The problem with identity is that it causes us to believe we are, yet often, what we think we are is naught but that which we have been caused to believe, is.

It is on a similar premise that ethnicity, a sub-category of identity, is predicated.

Ethnicity is – as Mahmood Mamdani and others have elaborated so convincingly in their scholarship – as much a construction of power, privilege and historical competition as is religion, gender, nationality, class, et-ce-tera.

 It is no more ‘naturalized’ than one’s dressing code or music-genre preference, and warrants to be treated with as much skepticism, contempt and enmity as the others, especially when wedded to dogma, before the alter of supposed cultural-puritanism.

We are never born anything. Whatever we eventually become, we have to be first taught, deliberately or adventitiously, by persons, institutions and/or circumstances.

If our people were adequately curious, they’d eventually discover that human identity – what food we like, what colors we prefer, the language we speak, the people we consider worthy of love – are nothing more than historical coincidences, and constructions of the societies into which we are born. 

The absurdity of it all is probably best illustrated by modern African ‘nationalities’.

Every time we walk around proclaiming our Ugandan-ness, Chaditude or Nigerian-ness – and waging wars against, or turning noses up at each other for their cause, all we are essentially saying is – 

‘‘Look everyone! Look how much of a jackass I can be. I proudly derive my identity from Bismark and his cronies, who schemed in a European capital 200 years back to name me ... ’’

When my friend Thaddeus, like many of us often do, made his spousal choice – I’m sure he was convinced he was doing it out of true love.

Little did he know that his concept of ‘true love’ merely amounted to a sociological fabrication.

I don’t think it merely chanceful that Thaddeus and his true-love, for instance – are of similar ethnicity, profess the same faith, are both University educated, and as if to spite the whole notion of diversity; both madly love The Bold and the Beautiful.

Isn’t it why most Ugandans develop discomfort and repulsion over seeking spouses outside their ethnic, religious or even class enclaves?

The average Ganda bachelor, chances are, will be looking for a ‘good Muganda girl’ (whatever that does mean), to take to wife.

The Muslim girl would never dare accept a Catholic boy’s request for her hand, even when they both happen to be Acholi, lest an enraged and overly-protective hatchet-wielding, bushy-bearded Hajji somewhere decides to dispatch another infidel to the afterlife.

(This I relate from acutely personal experience, having made several such attempts, only to escape by the skin of my teeth.)

Conversely – the boy’s own Pope-adoring parents and family would categorically instruct him to have nothing to do with ‘‘that succubus’’ and her family of – as many ‘African Christians’ I know are wont to vehemently declare – ‘‘demonic Muslims’’.

A University-educated woman would never dream of being married to an unschooled man, though both may be Anglican and native to Kigezi.

And indeed, for all its navigational acumen, the ‘‘Holy Ghost’’ – that premium matchmaker for Africa’s Pentecostal couples – is very unlikely to lead a sistah to a brothah from a vastly different or acutely marginalized ethnicity, or one from an economic class to which the ‘‘spirit-led’’ seeker happens to be social-economically distant.

To be sure, I have the misfortune to know a bunch of knuckleheads who would consider it a real comedown in life to marry outside their profession.

At the end of the day, we only love whom we are ‘permitted’ to love, not necessarily whom we are ‘fated’ to love, or unconditionally enamored of.

In this case, the authorizing bodies are our family, class, ethnicity, religion and in more ‘cosmopolitan’ communities – even race.

And if the authorities on our license to love are nothing more than constructions of society, who is to say that the love we hold (or think we hold) is not a construction too?

It is important to salute all the courageous men and women who’ve made deliberate attempts to circumvent this age-old rubric on affection, and dared to love across the narrow grottoes of where they were born, or which name their grandparents had for God.

They are not merely being patriotic (which they admirably are), for they are forging new bonds of kinship among the various ‘peoples’ of their countries who were arbitrarily squashed together by modern state-formation – they are also doing a nobler thing, that is, being brave enough to define love as they feel it, not as they think or learn it.

We should stop marrying people out of ‘inherited’ love, which is nothing more than a primordial fear – the fear of people who don’t look like us, talk like us, eat the food we do, or wear the clothes we do.

Perhaps, if my mate Thaddeus had gone to more kindergartens, and met more little girls (or boys?) in his childhood, he’d have a different sweet for his heart altogether. Only perhaps.

Indubitably, this war against historical and highly politicized fear of the other, cannot be won in a single moon – which is why couples like Thaddeus and his childhood sweetheart need be celebrated, if not out of love, at least out of pity.

They’ve no idea what they missed out on.

Poor things.


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